Facebook needs a ‘reset’ button for your friend list

Those friend connections form what has become known as Facebooks social graph, the layer of personal relationships that gives the company a competitive advantage over virtually every other communications platform around.

Building a network of connections is hard, so a lot of internet companies encourage customers to port one over from Facebook.

Starting your friend list from zero would let Facebooks algorithms, the software that decides what posts you see and what posts you dont, re-learn what you actually want to see. In theory, youd start to see more from the people youre closest to the first people youd re-add as friends and less from that one guy you had that one class with in college.

You can also narrow the list of people who can see your posts, though it requires going in and manually adding or excluding people to that list each time you share something.

One of Facebooks biggest product focuses over the past 18 months has been around private groups, which essentially recreate the Facebook experience but with a smaller group of people.

Last January, Facebook changed its software algorithms to show users more posts from other people and fewer posts from publishers and brands.

Original article
Author: Recode

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